Centonisation is, simply, grouping of musical phrases and naming each group with the help of syllables and using them in different places of a composition to create new melodies. Senior Sama Veda researcher Wayne Howard states emphatically in his Veda Recitation in Variance that what western musicologists call "Centonisation" was ustilised in the Sama Veda Samhita and its auxiliary texts. It is through the Sama Veda that the ancient liturgical world of music has come up with a formal system of music. I think Sama Veda is a similar, but much more complex and creative, artistic and appealing way of remembering the thousands of mantras in the Vedas. Here, S, C, T are Sine, Cosine and Tangent while H, B and P are, respectively, the hypotenuse, base and perpendicular of a right-angle triangle and the sentence would denote their relationship. We were taught in school to remember the Sine, Cosine and Tangent relationship through a simple funny English sentence some people have curly black turned purplish brown. Imagine if our physics formulae were set to suitable music we would possibly have made science more appealing, attracting more students into the science stream and the formulae would be communicated to a wider audience. The Sama Veda is an artistic way of communicating science. The silver lining in the dark cloud is that some top scientists are now investigating the science of Vedas. Yet there is little interest being generated in the Vedas among most people. It has been shown in a premiere scientific institute in Pune that the yajna-bhasma being of the size of nano-particles had deeply positive effects on human health and the environment. The yajnas, apart from their religious functions, were unfortunately termed as mere 'rituals' even by Indian scholars and so their secular significance has been undermined. One needs to find out why the world's oldest composite literature on religion, sciences, humanities and spirituality attracts little public attention today. In spite of the fact that a large number of rich Indians possess more wealth than the world's richest, we demonstrate such ignorance about the Vedas in general and the Sama Veda in particular. We have, it could be said, mindlessly pursued a line of development causing unwelcome changes to the very fabric of our culture not very different from iconoclastic behaviour. While the modern Indian has made progress in various fields, the priceless intangible heritage of works like the Sama Veda have gone unnoticed - a great loss indeed. Out of the 13 branches of Sama Veda termed as 'shakhas', now we have only four, of which scholars say the Kauthumiya is a modified Ranayaniya shakha, leaving us only with three.
This situation might have arisen from the discouragement of idol worship this would ultimately see the demise of a culture with its unique art, craft, economics, beliefs, people and their practices which were actually cultural givens of that era. With the Sama Veda being reduced to a point of near extinction, we are at the brink of losing not only its unique music, but also the complete world view it presents. It naturally incorporates music, mantra, chhanda, linguistics, and above all, a reflection of the world view of rishis who communicated in the Arsha language, precursor to the more regimented Girvan (later called Sanskrit). Understanding the meanings of words in a mantra and their deeper meanings is of great help in this process.Sama Veda is perhaps the earliest human literature on music. The psychological powers associated with the deities such as the will-power, clarity of mental operations, inspiration can be developed with the help of these mantras. Note that symbolism is an integral part of the meaning behind these mantras. The last part of the book deals with the psychological powers associated with the various deities occurring in Sama mantras and the text and meaning of the associated mantras. Even though the information given here is not original, the presentation of this body of knowledge in a compact form is a highlight of this book.Ĭhapter 19 is particularly interesting because of the use of relatively advanced mathematics in devising a scheme for detecting errors in the pronunciation of accents during chanting. The book also delineates some aspects of Sama Veda related to music. This book deals with the necessary information regarding the texts, rishis, translators, connection to Upanishads and Rig Veda, etc.